During the last Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) meeting, the REPAR researchers organised an interactive workshop. The workshop intended to communicate our view of an integrated design process in which the input from all three sub projects is used, and to let the participating company representatives reflect on this view.

Approach

The envisioned design process was presented as a storyboard to the group. After going through the storyboard (explaining each of the 15 slides), we asked the participants to reflect on the storyboard slides; how well does a particular action/event on a slide translate to a situation in your own company? The participants used red and green post-its to indicate ‘problematic’ or ‘feasible’ translations respectively.

The storyboard slides with post-its added by company representatives. Green post-its indicate that participants can translate these slides/situations to their own company. Red post-its indicate problematic or infeasible translations.

Results

The storyboard and post-it’s were a good starting point for some discussions about the design process and the use of REPAR tools and methods.

idAnimate (Sub Project A) is generally considered a useful tool throughout the early stages of the design process, but mainly to create and present ideas in an early stage within a design team.

“… it might me a good tool to let customers express their thoughts; sometimes you talk for an hour, thinking you understand the customer demands (or the other way around), but in the end you don’t.”

There is some hesitation about letting end-users create animations/visuals with idAnimate themselves.

Discussions related to virtual reality (Sub Project B) were mainly about ‘fidelity’ of the environments. Discussion about different ways of using VR made clear that it depends on the type of product involved, the particular aim of involving users (e.g. evaluation, configuration, generation, etc.) and other aspects. It should be noted that there we some discussions about this topic from which it can be concluded that there are a lot of different interpretations of what VR is or isn’t, and what ‘high fidelity’ and ‘low fidelity’ are (see transcript). Furthermore, there was an interesting discussion about the difference in fidelity of context and products. Sometimes, a high fidelity context can support detailed discussions about a product without also representing that product in high fidelity.

Concerning the co-construction stories (Sub Project C) the main outcome of the workshop was the reaction of the representatives from the companies on using other REPAR tools in different phases of the co-constructing stories method. There was some discussion about the use of idAnimate by end-users while they are sharing their stories with the designers. In order for idAnimte to support co-constructing stories, the tool should be instantly usable for end-users participating in the session. The designer can facilitate this by preparing some libraries in advance. Furthermore, the focus of the designer should not only be on what is created by the end-users with idAnimate but also on what the user is telling while he is creating a particular visual.

“… the use of these tools is important because it allows users to explain things; why things happen in a particular way, but it’s not about what they look like.”

The discussion about the use of VR applications in relation to co-constructing stories was limited to the use of VR applications in general and did not reveal much insights from the method point of view.

Conclusion

The following is concluded from the workshop session.

• Seeing all the sub projects in an integral storyboard helps company representatives with understanding the relations between the sub projects (concluded from post-session discussions).
• The group exercise could be repeated in a more company-specific storyboard: instead of using a generic topic, show how the integrated tool chain would work for a specific company’s product development process.
• The more ‘concrete’ the sub project topic, the easier it is to discuss it in this setting; participants had no problem with imagining the use of idAnimate in various scenes of the storyboard, while the co-constructing stories (a method) and VR (specific applications) are more difficult to ‘play around’ with.

Overall it’s been a useful exercise for both the researchers and the company representatives, mainly by providing a shared view on the current state of the sub projects, as well as the relations between the sub projects.